


Headline News

by Slybrarian



Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1
Genre: Community: sg_rarepairings, M/M, Marriage, Outed, Same-Sex Marriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-07
Updated: 2009-12-07
Packaged: 2017-10-04 06:28:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27031
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slybrarian/pseuds/Slybrarian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cam realized that secret make-out spots didn't necessary stay secret for twenty years right about the time his bare ass ended up on the internet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Headline News

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Dossier for betaing.

So here's how it got started.

Disclosure occurred back in July, a carefully-planned slow unveiling that somehow went smoothly. That was kinda the point, of course - they waited until there was nothing for people to worry about and let out information in slow little dribbles so that people would have time to adjust. There were no more Goa'uld, no more Ori, the Lucian Alliance had discovered that messing with Asgard weapons wasn't worth the trouble, and while the Wraith were still around they were safely in another galaxy and still mostly classified anyways. Add on the near-limitless energy and the cures for just about every major disease on the planet, and people didn't have much to be scared about. Of course, it still meant that the major figures of Homeworld Security - including the former members of SG-1 and the Atlantis command staff - were spending a hell of lot of time in front of Congressional panels and the cameras of every news show on the planet. When the Labor Day weekend rolled around, everyone breathed a sigh of relief and fled for somewhere they can rest and recuperate.

For Cam and John, that meant Auburn, Kansas.

Now, Cam still hadn't gotten around to telling his parents that he and John are more than just friends. He planned to do it before they left Monday night, and he didn't think they would react too poorly. But he had been putting off telling them about the bisexual thing for twenty-some years and Cam wanted to have one stress-free Saturday before potentially dealing with family drama. That put a bit of a crimp in their avenues for relaxation, unfortunately, but Cam came up with a way to deal with that. It involved them, a picnic basket, a blanket, and the two four-wheelers his parents kept around for when his brother's kids visit.

"I'm stealing your mom," John said as they lay in the shade of some trees and ate after several hours riding around the countryside. He was wolfing down a piece of the pie Cam's mom had made for them. "When I go back to Atlantis, she's coming with me."

Cam laughed. "I really don't think so, John."

"I'm serious."

"Still not happening," Cam said. He leaned in and kissed John, tasting blueberry on his lips. "I'll make it up to you, though."

John grinned at him. "You better keep your hands to yourself. Anyone could see us."

"Trust me, no one can see us down here." Cam had been sure to find one of his old hiding spots, a little grotto among the trees that line one of the numerous little creeks that wind through the fields. He had no intention of getting interrupted anytime soon.

"You sure?" John said, the dare evident in his voice. He wasn't exactly acting like he was afraid of getting caught, either, not with the way he was sliding a hand up Cam's shirt.

"Never got caught before," Cam murmured while thumbing open the buttons of John's fly.

"Did you bring a lot of girls and guys out here in high school?" John asked. He kicked off his shoes and wiggled his way out of his t-shirt, before laying back and letting Cam pull his pants away. As he watched Cam strip down as well, John affected an exaggerated, high-pitched drawl and asked, "Are you gonna respect me in the morning, Cam?"

Cam laughed and reached for the lube and condoms he put in the basket. "Don't you worry about that, baby," he drawled back. "Just lay back and let me make y'all feel real nice."

"I don't think you can call one person y'all."

"Shut up and let me fuck you," Cam ordered, straddling John and pushing him down into the blanket.

"Well, if you put it like that, how can I say no?"

They took it slow, savoring the chance to do this the right way after a long spell of nothing but fevered quickies in hotel rooms. Cam got down between John's legs, licking and sucking at his cock and balls for a while before making his way down further. He worked John open with his tongue, rimming him until John was begging for him to finally "_just fuck me already, Mitchell!"_ Cam grinned to himself and murmured for John to just hold his horses. He slicked up two fingers and slipped them in, crooking them up to gently press John's prostate in a way that drew a sharp gasp. There was no need for a third finger, John was already as relaxed as he would ever get, so Cam rolled on a rubber and got up on his knees. He lifted John's legs over his shoulders, lined up, and slid right on into John's waiting hole. They held still like that for a moment, intimately connected, their faces flushed and split by broad smiles, then Cam started to fuck John. They kept at it for what felt like hours, Cam thrusting away smooth and steady, and soon they were bent over face to face in a way that their bodies would protest later but feel so damn good right then. Finally John's eyes squeezed shut and his hot come sprayed across their stomachs. Cam followed soon after, grinning like a loon because even after all this time he still got inordinately proud of himself every time he brought John off just by fucking him.

"Maybe there's something to country living after all," John idly said later, while they lay spooned together in the afternoon sun and breeze, hot and sticky in all the right ways.

"Tonight I'll take you out in the barn for a roll in the hay," Cam said. "And tomorrow I'll fuck you in the back of my pickup. That way you'll get the full, authentic experience."

"Should I be drunk for that last part?"

"It's optional."

Eventually they had to move again. They took a quick dip in the creek to get themselves cleaned up, because the last thing Cam wanted to do was show up at home smelling of sex, and he knew from painful experience that dried come didn't agree with the hair on his belly. They made it back home in time to help do some maintenance on one of the tractors. After that it was time for dinner and then a movie with Cam's mom and dad. They did, of course, make it out to the barn after his parents were in bed.

After breakfast the next morning, his parents headed off to Sunday services while Cam and John stayed behind. Cam's faith was still strong but those days he wasn't comfortable with most churches; what John believed was one of those things they'd never talked about. In any case, they ended up snuggled on the couch and idly flipping through different versions of ESPN.

Then Cam's cell started ringing.

He groaned and pulled it out, checking the caller ID as he did. "Hey, Sam."

"Cam. Where are you?"

"My parents' living room. Why? Is the planet about to blow up?"

"Not exactly. Turn on CNN."

Cam frowned at the hint of worry in her voice. He pulled the remote from John's grasp and changed the channel."

"Holy shit," Cam says. John echoes him with a hearty, "Oh, fuck."

There was an anchor blabbing on about something, but Cam tuned her out entirely as he focused on the video that was playing. It showed him and John, sitting under the trees and eating lunch. It wasn't the clearest video ever, but it was more than good enough that there was no question it's them. They were laughing about something, then Cam leaned in and gave John a peck on the lips.

"Okay, that can be explained as a joke," Cam said faintly. Of course, then the video jumped to them taking off their clothes, while the anchor talked about Air Force regulations and Big Damn Space Heroes and secret trysts. "Or not. Sam, how much does this show?"

"Oh, it shows everything anyone could want to see," Sam said dryly. "There's about an hour of video total. It was uploaded to a couple different sites from a residential broadband connection in your area, and now it's just about everywhere. It only just got on the news a few minutes ago."

"Christ." Knowing Cam's luck, it had probably been some damned teenager with a video camera and too much time on his hands.

"You said no one could see us there," John loudly reminded Cam.

"I guess I'm not the only one who knows about that spot," Cam said. "Sorry."

John's own phone suddenly started to ring, and while continuing to glare at Cam he answered it.

"You have any clue what we should do, Sam?" Cam asked, at a complete loss himself. This wasn't the kind of situation that his training covered, or even his experience with SG-1. He was pretty sure that taking hostages until he could get through the stargate wouldn't be much help.

"I'm beaming back to Washington in a couple of minutes to talk to the general. For now, just stay where you are," Sam replied. "And whatever you do, don't go outside. It probably won't take long for the local media to show up."

"You'd be surprised." Cam was pretty sure that most of the stations in Topeka didn't exactly do Sunday mornings under normal circumstances. It would take them a while to get organized and track him down. "Listen, I need to call my parents. I'll catch you later."

"Take care, Cam. And watch out for John." There was a pause, and even over the phone Cam could tell she was smiling. "I'm sure you can find some way to keep him distracted."

"That I can. Bye."

Meanwhile, John was having a conversation of his own. "- what do you mean, you're insulted that I never told you? I did tell you!" John listened for a minute with a deep frown. "No, seriously, I told you six, seven months ago. On the planet with the drugs and the bears. A metaphor? How could you possibly think it was a metaphor? No, he doesn't own horses - yeah, okay, I have some, but Jesus Christ." Suddenly his expression turned shifty. "No, you imagined that part. I'd never use a phrase like undying love. Seriously, ask Ronon. Actually, don't."

"Do I even want to know what you're talking about?" Cam asked while hitting the speed-dial for his mom's cell. It went straight to voice mail, of course; he should have known she would have it off for church.

"McKay's hallucinating," John told him. "Yeah, hallucinating, Rodney, you heard me. Look, I'm not the one who hears things about riding another guy hard and thinks it means I want to take him on some kind of horseback nature trip. No, you shut up. No, you. You know what, I'm hanging up now. Stay indoors and for God's sake, don't talk to anyone. Pretend it's a diplomatic mission and the reporters all have machine guns. No, you can't let Ronon shoot any of them. No, really, hanging up now."

Cam started flipping back and forth between CNN and MSNBC, not even daring to try Fox. Both channels seemed to be spinning their wheels, probably caught completely off-guard with most of their staff off for the holiday. It didn't help that they only had the one source of information. Cam guessed that it was just the calm before the storm; sooner or later they'd start dragging in more commentators and doing some digging.

"You know," John said after a few minutes, "I always kinda expected my career to go down in a flaming wreck, but not quite this kind of flaming."

Cam shot him an incredulous glance. "Seriously?"

"What?" John grinned back. "I just I wish I could see the face on James Kovachs' face when he finds out that the guys who beat him out for the top slots at flight school are a pair of queers."

"Kovachs had a heart attack three years ago."

John's face fell. "Really?"

"Yes."

"Damn."

"You're ten years old, Sheppard."

"Yeah, well, your private make-out sites suck."

"You suck."

"You wished I sucked. I'm damned well not sucking anything of yours anytime soon."

"Yeah, right." Cam rolled his eyes. He frowned as something new came up on the TV. "Who the hell is that?"

"I have no idea," John said.

There was a reporter interviewing a short, middle-aged woman on some nondescript street. Cam was fairly certain that he had never seen her before in his life. That brought up all sorts of new worries; there had been countless women and not a few men sending him letters and claiming to be his One True Love, and if they all ended up on TV, Cam was going to die of embarrassment.

Fortunately, she turned out not to be one of his supposed astral-plane lovers.

"Yeah, Cam and Shep were here Thursday night," the woman said. "I wasn't the one serving them, but they were in the next section over. We were all thrilled to have them here, of course, but we tried not to make a deal about it. They looked a bit tired and I don't think they would have wanted too much attention on their romantic dinner."

"Our what?" Cam asked. "Do you remember a romantic dinner?"

"Nope," John said. "I just remember stumbling into the first halfway-decent place we came across."

The reporter asked, "You mean they were on a date?"

"Well, they didn't say it," the woman replied. "But you know how it is, they can't act like anything but friends in public, especially since they're so well known. Still, it was obvious from the way they looked at each other that they were head over heels for each other."

Cam lifted the remote and turned down the volume. "This is ridiculous. She's just making shit up."

"Are you saying you're not head over heels for me?" John asked.

Cam knew that underneath the sarcasm and irreverence, John was just as worried and annoyed as Cam is. He still smacked him upside the head. "No, I'm pretty sure we're past that."

"Really?"

"Yeah. Now I'm to the point where I realize that you're actually a gigantic pain in the ass, but still worth the trouble."

"I don't know if I should be touched or insulted."

"No reason you can't be both."

John's phone started ringing. He glanced at the screen and paled a little, before carefully holding down the power switch until it turned off. A few seconds later, Cam's phone started up. Cam eyed John suspiciously, but his partner had suddenly gotten very interested in the TV.

With a deep breath, Cam flipped the phone open and said, "Mitchell."

"You know, I can't believe I have to say this to a full-bird colonel who is supposedly one of the best officers of his generation," O'Neill said, "but would it really have been that hard to get a room?"

"In retrospect, sir, that does seem like it would have been a good idea."

"Ya think?" O'Neill said sharply.

Cam winced. "Sorry, sir."

"Sorry? Oh, you're going to be sorry, all right. I'm supposed to be fishing at my cabin right now, and instead I'm sitting in the Pentagon because you decided it'd be fun to screw out in a field somewhere."

"To be fair, sir, we weren't actually in a field."

There was a long, drawn-out pause. When O'Neill finally spoke again, there was something that might almost be a hint of laughter in his voice. "Whatever. Either way, your bare ass is plastered all over the Internet. This is a mess."

"Yes, it is, sir." Cam reached out to take John's hand. "When do you want our resignations by?"

"Resignations? If you think I'm letting you off the hook that easily, you're an idiot. I suggest you practice looking like the most wholesome, all-American couple that's ever existed. Maybe adopt a stray dog or something. And for God's sake, don't let Sheppard do anything stupid."

"I don't think -" Cam started, but the line cut off. "You know, for some reason everyone seems to think I need to keep you from jumping off a bridge or something. We're not fired, by the way, although I think we might eventually wish we were."

John's response was to try to steal the remote. Cam instinctively defended his possession of it, his reflexes well-honed by years living with his dad and brother, and there was a quick but vicious tussle that ended when they tumbled off the couch and onto the floor.

"Oww," John said from beneath Cam. "I just wanted to change the channel."

"Why?"

"No reason." John utterly failed to look innocent, as if Cam would have believed him for a second even if he could. There was another interview on the TV, this time with some scraggly-looking guy named Todd Stevens.

"Look, I don't even know how you guys found my name," Todd was saying. "All I'll say is that yeah, I was a friend with John, and yeah, he made going to a military boarding school a lot more fun than it might have been. If you want to hear more, you'll have to ask him yourselves." He shut his door in the news crew's face.

"Who was that?"

"A guy I knew in high school." John tried to push Cam away. "Will you get off? You're heavy."

That was an evasion if Cam's ever heard one. "I thought you like that I'm heavy."

"Not when I'm on a hardwood floor."

Cam knew that there was some connection that he wasn't quite making there, but under the circumstances it seemed like a good idea to just let it go. If John had some deep, dark secret about this Todd guy, he'd either share it in his own time or it wasn't important enough for Cam to worry about.

The next forty minutes were more of the same. Cam left several voicemails on his parents' phones, not that he expected either of them would check until well into the post-sermon social hour. That assumed that someone didn't turn on a radio, of course. Meanwhile, the news reached steady fever pitch, intermingling blustering commentators with whatever random 'experts' and 'witnesses' they could find. According to the ticker bar they had been deemed "Star-Crossed Lovers?", complete with a question mark, and overall the reaction was somewhat mixed. Most people seemed to be at least vaguely supportive of them, but there was a sizeable group that hated the very idea of the Stargate Program and not coincidentally also hated the idea of happy gay people. Cam found himself getting increasingly pissed as time went on.

The problem was John, of course. Or rather, it was not so much John as the idea of John that other people seemed to have in their heads. Cam was the good boy from the heartland, the hero of Antarctica, the leader of SG-1. If he was a little bit queer, well, no one could be absolutely perfect. Occasionally sleeping with men was an interesting character flaw that made him human.

John, on the other hand, had a different reputation. He was considered a hero by most, sure, but he was also the dashing rogue with a troubled past. He bucked authority and stepped out of bounds to do what he thought was right. He was Batman to Cam's Superman. (Well, okay, no one had said that - yet.) He was rumored to have girls on a dozen different worlds. Apparently it made half the planet wonder when he was going to leave Cam behind, alone and heartbroken. Add in the endless speculation about just what they were to each other - was it one-time fling for stress relief? Friends with benefits? True love? - and pretty soon Cam was ready to start beaming from studio to studio punching people in the face.

It was immensely satisfying when a reporter asked Nancy Collins if her marriage failed because John was using her as a beard and she knocked him out.

"You know, we don't have to watch this," John said quietly. At the moment there was a psychologist pontificating about how John exhibited classic escapist behavior and was unable to form stable relationships, meaning that poor romantic Cam was clearly doomed. John was taking it a lot better than Cam was, if anything he seemed amused. His natural fatalism was serving him a lot better than Cam's righteous anger on John's behalf was serving Cam.

"It's not like I have anything better to do," Cam grunted back. He wondered how hard it would be to steal the _Odyssey_ and flee to Pegasus, where people were too busy surviving to invent the 24 hours news cycle. It would probably be a bit impractical, though.

The show moved on to viewer comments, with Tom from Annapolis being the first. When he started speaking, John suddenly stiffened at Cam's side.

"I know I shouldn't be sayin' this, because of privacy and all that," Tom said, "but I can't let you people go on bad-mouthin' that poor man any longer."

"Oh, shit," John hissed. He made another grab for the remote, which Cam foiled by tossing it behind the couch. John scrambled after it.

"About four months ago, right before all this talk about spaceships and aliens got started, the Sheppard boy came down to my jewelry shop wantin' something real special, just like he did years ago when he was with that nice Nancy gal, and like his brother and daddy did before him. Now, I've helped a lot of people in my day, and I can see when someone's just going through the motions and when someone's really invested in what they're doing. Let me tell you, miss, I've never seen someone fret so much over choosing the right engagement ring as John --"

The TV clicked and turned off. Cam looked over his shoulder, gaping like a fish, and saw John with the remote. He looked a bit put out, like he had just found one of his tires was flat. Cam couldn't think of anything to say and just stared.

"I don't suppose you could forget you heard that?" John finally asked.

"Not really," Cam managed to say.

"Oh. Uh, in that case, could you hold on while I go grab something from upstairs?"

"No. Yes. I mean," Cam paused and tried to figure out what he was trying to say. "I mean, yes to what you're going to ask. If you are, I mean."

John crossed his arms and gave Cam an indignant glare. "I was going to make a speech, you know. Get down on one knee, offer you the ring, the whole shebang. Thanks for ruining it."

"You," Cam said slowly, "were going to get down on one knee and propose."

"Yeah."

"Since when do you do grand romantic gestures?"

John sort of shrugged awkwardly and looked down at his feet. "I don't, but you do. I thought you'd like it."

"Oh." Cam stood up and slowly walked over to John. Cam pulled him tight against him and murmurs, "Sorry. It's just, you know..."

John chuckled. "Yeah, I get it. It's probably better this way. Otherwise I'd probably be sitting in the infirmary with the doctors trying to see if I'm an alien."

"Tell you what. You can do your grand gesture later." Cam nuzzled at John's neck and nips at the lobe of his ear. "Right now, I figure we've got about twenty, thirty minutes until my parents get back."

"What, you're tired of watching TV all of a sudden?"

"I've found something more positive to do with my time."

Later, when his parents came home and he told them the truth; when he was standing in a Pentagon press room with John and his side and explained that yes, they're gay, not that it's anyone's business; when he finally got back out among the stars and suddenly realized that he was once more separated from John by thirty million light-years...

Through all that, he thought he was the luckiest man in the universe.


End file.
